


shampain

by snugglepup



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alcoholism, Canon Compliant, Gen, Sadstuck, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 03:37:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1729733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snugglepup/pseuds/snugglepup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The labels on the bottles didn't mean anything: names that the Dersites couldn't identify, varying numbers labeled 'proof,' <em>proof of what</em>, you wondered, and then moved on. Like so many things in your home they remained enigmatic, and you wondered if someday you'd find another disc in the lab explaining what they were, what they were used for, why there were so many of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	shampain

_drinking champagne made of an angel's tears and pain, but i feel celestial_

_elderly stars slide down the morning sky, slipping away to find a place to die_

_i wonder when the night will reach its end, 'cause sleep is not my friend_

_marina & the diamonds - shampain_

 

* * *

 

It's innocent enough in the beginning, when you still don't really understand what you're doing to yourself, when you're young and hurting but there's still so much less to think and feel, so much less responsibility. You're thirteen years old and through carefully orchestrated videos, through the kindness of a few carapaceons who remember old ways (it's always the Dersites, that's what you find funny later, always the ones who were supposed to be cruel), you've learned to speak, you've learned to read, you've learned to write, and most importantly, you've learned to use these things to operate an internet connection the functionality of which you won't think to be baffled by until much later.

You poked at the cabinets in the kitchen, at the cellars filled with an almost ludicrous amount of bottles that look somehow similar and yet completely different, but after opening one and carefully sniffing at its contents you poured it out the window into the sea in case the fumes were dangerous. The labels on the bottles didn't mean anything: names that the Dersites couldn't identify, varying numbers labeled 'proof,' _proof of what,_ you wondered, and then moved on.

Like so many things in your home they remained enigmatic, and you wondered if someday you'd find another disc in the lab explaining what they were, what they were used for, why there were so many of them.

It was something you hoped for, because it had been a year since something somewhere slid open to reveal a new disc, and every fresh glimpse at the brilliance of your Mom made you think of how it feels when you eat after having forgotten to for long enough that your chest seems to be caving in on itself.

Long ago the woman who is the only human who has ever communicated with you in any way, even if it could only be to monologue, told you her name, told you what a mother was, that she knew that someday you would exist and she would do her best to _'guide you through the murky and labyrinthine abyss that is existence in a decaying world filled with ephemeral creatures soon to find solace in the endless void, or perhaps, if the world holds a hint of the kindness it has never before revealed, solace in some unknowable realm of amelioration and respite._ ' It took you years to understand that sentence and when you did, you were almost as proud of yourself as you were sad and anxious about what it meant.

The next video, short and hasty and set to appear less than five minutes after the other, said only that she was not your mother, that there was more sorrow in that truth than she could ever express, but that it was the truth nonetheless; in the _'drowned yet desiccated world she knew you would call home, no mothers remained, and how could she be such a thing when you were separated by the heartless march of centuries?_ ' You thought of what she had said about mothers before and you replayed the previous disc and the name Rose Lalonde ceased to be the label applied to that woman by the reflexive thought processes at work in the front of your mind.

From that day on, there was only Mom.

 

* * *

 

About halfway through your thirteenth year something changes with your laptop. A program installs itself without your permission. It's called 'Pesterchum,' although you don't know exactly who you're supposed to be pestering, since you're the only human alive and if you want to spend time with your carapaceon friends all you have to do is leave the house, although the truth is you do that less and less these days as you start to feel like more and more of an outsider every day even though this is your home too. And beyond that installation is something of the reverse, as locks you never thought too hard about release themselves from your browser and abruptly the entirety of the internet, all of the information ever stored within, is within your reach, so much more than you realized. Countless 404s and other messages indicating missing pages are replaced by those pages themselves, still running on who can say what servers. It had never crossed your mind that 95% of that content wasn't _really_ missing but merely obfuscated in exactly the way you know Mom would have done it.

You hesitantly open this Pesterchum thing and when you're asked to input a 'chumhandle' to represent yourself you have no idea what you should call yourself so you just press the space bar a single time. It feels right somehow to be identified by something that can't be seen, because the only person you've ever wanted to see you died centuries ago. You're asked to set a password, although who you'd need to protect this thing from you have no idea. It's obvious what to type. A smaller window pops up requesting you select a text color from an extremely wide array as well as informing you that you can change your color again at any time if you so desire. You think again of your handle and blank white isn't an option so you choose solid black. The last prompt is to re-enter the information you just registered to log in.

 

enter handle: _

enter password: xxx

login successful!

 

The program expands into a cheery yellow window with some functions you'll work out later. What catches your eye immediately is the word 'Chums,' which as far as you can recall is a synonym for 'friends,' and beneath it... three names? No, three handles, obviously. It's hard to imagine what that could mean, or if you're being honest with yourself, you're afraid to let yourself think about what you're imagining, because what you're imagining is impossible. You look them over anyway: golgothasTerror, gutsyGumshoe, and timaeusTestified. The first one is sort of intimidating, the second doesn't really catch your interest, but the third... you search the first word and find more information than you're ready to process but see that the nature of the handle reminds you of Mom more than the others, more than anything else you've seen. Timaeus, who explained the origins and the nature of the very world itself, who spoke in Plato's writings of his idea of a demiurge before the term's apparent subjugation by Gnostics, a figure who took meaningless substance and gave it form. Your heart is beating nearly hard enough to hurt and everything about this screams _Mom,_ has what you imagine might be the scent of wild roses hanging over each individual word, and there are a whole lot of words. Clicking the handle once and then realizing you need to double-click, you open a window and stare at its near-blankess with shaking hands.

_ [_] began bothering timaeusTestified [TT]

TT: So what's this shit? It doesn't matter what some sad excuse for a program is trying to do here, witch. You can't trace this motherfucker and neither can those tin cans that keep buzzing around the planet like there's something left for them to find.

_: um i dont know what a lot of that stuff means

_: who are you? are you a human?

TT: No, I'm a fucking leprechaun. Follow my rainbow, I'm waiting in a bigass pot of fake gold coins and gaudy bling and you're dead wrong if you think this sword can't cut through steel armor plating.

_: are you real?

TT: Okay, I don't know what this bullshit is but I'm not interested in being fucked with right now. Or ever, actually. You're either a hilariously poorly thought out trap or the last and weirdest spambot on the entire web. You've got one more message to prove you're worth my time.

_: i dont want to be alone any more

TT: Goodbye.

_: wait please dont

 

timaeusTestified [TT]  blocked _ [_]

_: leave me

 

But you have unquestionably been left. You look over the other two names on the list, the ones that haven't utterly rejected you, at least not yet, and then you log out of Pesterchum and sob for an hour with your head on your desk because something in your heart isn't working right any more, something vital has been destroyed and you don't think it'll ever come back. When that hour is over and you still can't stop the tears even if you've managed to wrestle back enough control of yourself to get short breaks from the hitching in your chest and the miserable sounds that rake your strained throat with every pulse of air, you re-open Nix, enter _'how do i make the pain stop'_ and find the same question on a staggeringly ancient site called 'Yahoo Answers.' The only response the long-dead asker received is 'get some everclear and chug it until you black out. that or go cut yourself emo kid. oh wait youre probably already doing that lol cry moar faggot'.

You get away from that page as fast as you can and then, even though that answer sounded pretty mean, you're grasping for anything at all so you search _'everclear',_ and half an hour later you know not to drink it, which is good because you don't think you have any, and more importantly you finally know what all of those bottles are for and what was in all of those little glasses Mom's always drinking from in her videos.

In another half hour you've made and downed your first three vodka martinis and the sobbing's given way to a much more tolerable bitter giggling. You try to stand but the room seems to bend and reel and you barely manage to stagger back to your laptop and re-open Pesterchum. There's a function once you've logged in that lets you change your handle and not just your color. Thinking of your precious videos of Mom you remember the dark purple accents on her array of gorgeous dresses, tops, skirts, and you're not her so you won't use her colors, but they give you some inspiration. You giggle to yourself again when it occurs to you that you could make your color a private joke, so you pick a bright pinkish one that borders on fuchsia. She was everything and you're nothing, so why shouldn't your text have the brightness she deserved and you don't? This makes perfect sense to you in the moment and you laugh until tears are running down your face, tears you're _pretty_ sure don't have anything to do with the orange thing you sort of talked to a while ago.

The handle is harder and you end up making another joke out of it, inspired by the jaded and confusing TT. When Gnostics got hold of some of those writings they ended up redefining the demiurge as the originator of all evil, and since you're pretty sure you're the sort of idiot who would do something that stupid, you can identify with such mistakes, so that's a start. Then you think about some words you ran into that had to do with alcohol or ethanol or whatever it is that makes what you've been drinking so _amazing_ and figure you should include one of them. You've almost got it, but the two words don't quite flow the way you want them to.

As you sit there nursing a fourth martini that you'll halfway regret in the morning, you feel or maybe imagine you feel a sort of nostalgia, a murky and haunting feeling that you've done this before, been here before, like you're performing a sacred rite to show your love for Mom while simultaneously echoing something you can't remember, something that can't have happened it because it's a memory from years and years in a future that doesn't exist, and everything is so _funny_ right now so maybe that's why the feeling sticks in your head and gives rise to the pun that solidifies the name you'll be known by while using this program that you barely care is only going to keep on hurting you. Who cares if anything hurts when your house is full of liquids that can take the pain and almost make it into something else? So you type in your new handle, change your password to something that you think is going to sum up your life much better than the last one, finally click Save Changes, and there you are in all of your hollow glory.

 

enter handle: tipsyGnostalgic

enter password: xxxxxxx

login successful!

tipsyGnostalgic [TG] began bothering gutsyGumshoe [GG]

TG: heyyy hwo come your on my lpatop?

TG: *laptp

GG: I'm sorry, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. Do I know you?

TG: probly not

TG: do yu want too?


End file.
